“Very pretty, Frank,” said Aurelius, who had himself now gone wool-gathering and gave us the benefit of it. He told us that he had just recalled a church and a preacher whose voice used to enchant his boyhood into a half-dream. The light was dim as with gold dust. It was warm and sleepy, and to the boy all the other worshippers seemed to be asleep. The text was the three verses of the first chapter of Genesis which describe the work of creation on the fifth day. He heard the clergyman’s voice murmuring, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” “That was enough,” said Aurelius, “for me it was all the sermon. It summoned up before me a coast of red crags and a black sea that was white where the waves got lost in the long corridors between the crags. The moon, newly formed to rule the night, stood full, large, and white, at the top of the sky, which was as black as the sea and cloudless. And out of the water were rising, by twos and threes, but sometimes in multitudes like a cloud, the birds who were to fly in the open firmament of heaven. Out of the black waste emerged sea-birds, one at a time, their long white wings spread wide out at first, but then as they paused on the surface, uplifted like the sides of a lyre; in a moment they were skimming this way and that, and, rising up in circles, were presently screaming around the moon. Several had only risen a little way when, falling back into the sea, they vanished, there, as I supposed, destined by the divine purpose to be deprived of their wings and to become fish. Eagles as red as the encircling crags came up also, but always solitary; they ascended as upon a whirlwind in one or two long spirals and, blackening the moon for a moment, towered out of sight. The little singing birds were usually cast up in cloudlets, white and yellow and blue and dappled, and, after hovering uncertainly at no great height, made for the crags, where they perched above the white foam, piping, warbling, and twittering, after their own kinds, either singly or in concert. Ever and anon flocks of those who had soared now floated downward across the moon and went over my head with necks outstretched, crying towards the mountains, moors, and marshes, or sloped still lower and alighted upon the water, where they screamed whenever the surface yawned at a new birth of white or many-coloured wings. Gradually the sea was chequered from shore to horizon with birds, and the sky was throbbing continually with others, so that the moon could either not be seen at all, or only in slits and wedges. The crags were covered, as if with moss and leaves, by lesser birds who mingled their voices as if it were a dawn of May....”